Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Japanese student sets up free VPN service

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14602

There are a lot of people around the world that would like to bypass
firewalls set up by their governments, but not everybody can afford to
do it. Enter Daiyuu Nobori, a student from Tsukuba University in Japan
who a couple days ago set up and new - and free - VPN service that can
be used by everybody and anybody.

Based on the SoftEther
open-source VPN freeware, which is designed to run on Windows, Linux,
Mac, FreeBSD and Solaris, the VPN Gate service relies on volunteers
around the world to download the server software and set up Public VPN
Relay Servers for others to use.

"A volunteer is a person who owns a computer which is keeping the
broadband connection to the Internet. He is a person who agrees to
provide the CPU time and bandwidth to support the VPN Gate Academic
Experiment," it is explained. Anyone who can satisfy those requirements
can become a volunteer, and that's why these VPN servers hosted on
different ISPs around the world, on different IP address ranges.

A continually refreshed list of available servers
is provided on the service's website. Users can also find them via the
VPN client software that can also be downloaded from the official
website.

The service allows users to bypass your government firewalls to browse
oversea web sites, to camouflage their IP address to hide the source of
information sent over the Internet, and to protect their use of Wi-Fi
with strong encryption in order to avoid packet capture and analysis.

The website is available in Japanese, English and Chinese, and judging
by the connection logs of all VPN Gate Public VPN Servers, Chinese users
are currently most numerous, but not the only ones. Users from other
countries that are well-known for censuring political content are also
well represented, and even those from Western democracies are finding it
useful.

The number of available public servers to connect to fluctuates, as I write this there are 103.

According to Computerworld, the service has attracted over 75,000 users in less than a week, and the number is sure to rise.

Nobori says that his motive for creating this service was his wish to
help people around the world beat government censorship of the Internet.

"If people somewhere want to study and can't use services like Wikipedia
or Google, this is a big problem. Wikipedia has political articles, but
also articles about science and other topics," he says.